MemSQL Names Database Visionary Jerry Held as Executive Chairman

Former Oracle Executive, Vertica Chairman and RDBMS Pioneer Brings Key Industry Expertise to MemSQL as it Expands Adoption of its Distributed, In-Memory Database

SAN FRANCISCO, January 14, 2015 - MemSQL, the leader in real-time databases for transactional analytics, today announced that Jerry Held has joined the company as Executive Chairman. The technology veteran and visionary brings over 40 years experience in creating disruptive database technologies—starting with leading the initial development of the INGRES relational database while at U.C. Berkeley. Dr. Held is also chairman of Tamr and serves on the boards of Informatica, NetApp, Kalio and Copia Global.

“As the Big Data market transitions from an early adopter phase to much broader deployment, it is becoming clear that the greatest value will be derived from rapid data capture and analytics. However, legacy technologies cannot handle the velocity and volume of data in the timeframe required today," said Dr. Held. "That is why I decided to join MemSQL, a company that has designed a product from the ground up around an in-memory architecture to tackle today’s Big Data challenges.”

Dr. Held has been a successful entrepreneur, executive and investor in Silicon Valley for over 40 years. From 2006 through 2010, he was executive chairman of Vertica Systems (acquired by HP) and served as lead independent director of Business Objects until its sale to SAP in 2008. In 1998, Dr. Held was “CEO-in-residence” at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Through 1997, he was senior vice president of Oracle Corporation’s server product division where he was responsible for Oracle’s most important products during a period of rapid growth from $1.5 billion to $6 billion in annual revenues. Prior to Oracle, he spent 18 years at Tandem Computers, where he was a member of the executive team that grew Tandem from a startup to $2 billion in annual revenues—leading the initial development of Tandem’s relational database products.

“Jerry brings an unparalleled track record in growing and leading highly successful database businesses that have transformed the industry,” said Eric Frenkiel, MemSQL co-founder and CEO. “MemSQL leads the market with real-time operational analytics that enable companies to instantly ingest, process, and query large volumes of data. The addition of Jerry's experience, leadership and vision will accelerate the impact of our distributed in-memory database, and the real-time benefits it brings to customers."

“Rapid technological advances in in-memory computing have led to the emergence of hybrid transactional/analytical processing architectures that allow concurrent analytical and transaction processing on the same in-memory database or data store,” said Roxane Edjlali, Research Director, Ehtisham Zaidi, Contributing Analyst and Donald Feinberg, vice president and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner in the report, Market Guide for In-Memory DBMS. They continued, “This enables real-time analytics and situation awareness on ‘live’ transaction data as opposed to after-the-fact analysis on ‘stale data’. Going forward, Gartner expects the IMDBMS market to embrace this norm, and in the next five years we can expect that most organizations will have a combination of IMDBMS and regular disk-based DBMS.”

About MemSQL

MemSQL is the leader in real-time databases for transactional analytics. MemSQL is purpose built for instant access to real-time and historical data through a familiar SQL interface and uses a horizontally scalable distributed architecture that runs on commodity hardware. Innovative enterprises use MemSQL to accelerate time-to-value by extracting previously untapped value in their data that results in new revenue. MemSQL is proven in production environments across hundreds of nodes in high velocity Big Data environments. Based in San Francisco, MemSQL is a Y Combinator company funded by prominent venture capitalists and angel investors including Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital and Data Collective.